Future Flooring Concepts

184 innovative concept ideas for the Parador flooring of the future!

Background

Parador is the leading international design brand for flooring and wall design, both indoors and outdoors. With its innovative products, the company is continuously setting creative and qualitative benchmarks.

Parador belongs to the Hüls Group, which, with several internationally renowned brands, caters for a wide spectrum of discerning interior design requirements. Parador was founded in 1977 in Coesfeld, Germany. Today the company employs around 600 staff at sites in Coesfeld, Güssing and Frauental.

In 2010 the exclusive Parador product range included around 2500 items, and another 800 new products were added in 2011. Almost three quarters of the turnover is generated with products that are less than three years old. Around half of the Parador products are distributed in Germany and half in 65 other countries. Every year, Parador manufactures around 12.5 million square meters (equivalent to the floor area of more than 150,000 apartments measuring 80m²) of premium flooring with up to 25-year guarantees. Production takes place exclusively in Germany and Austria.

The Parador product range of flooring currently includes laminates, parquet and solid wood flooring in the three collections: Classic (timeless, understated elegance), Trendtime (interpretation and further development of the latest international furnishing trends) and Edition, which is synonymous with innovative design. For the Laminate Edition I collection, Parador worked together with 12 top designers from the international design scene, including Zaha Hadid, Karim Rashid, Matteo Thun and Jean Nouvel. The creative innovation capability of the Edition collection is being proven by the fact it has won significant international design awards like the AIT Award (Interior Innovation Award) and the reddot Design Award.

In order to underline the innovative character of the company and to continue positioning itself as a forerunner, Parador now wishes to develop new outstanding flooring concepts together with the jovoto Community.

Aim:

With innovative and future-oriented products, Parador wants to set creative and qualitative benchmarks as a leading design brand. The continuous development of trend-setting and sustainable flooring concepts is an integral part of the corporate strategy. Parador now wishes to work together with the jovoto Community and look towards the future.

Task Definition

Design innovative concept ideas for the Parador flooring of the future!

Parador is looking for fascinating and creative ideas for innovative and saleable flooring that will impress people with discerning and exclusive interior design tastes. Mere “design suggestions” for floors are welcome, as well as concept ideas that focus on functional, technical or structural aspects. Show how the aesthetic of flooring design will look in the future, which colors, shapes, patterns and surface structures the floor will have and which materials it is made from.

You should answer the following questions during the development of your flooring concept:

What is the next step in flooring, and in particular, wooden and laminate flooring?

What are the ideal properties for the flooring of the future?

What additional benefits/functions, such as lighting, sensor technology….etc. could the flooring offer?

What should the flooring look like in regard to sustainability aspects and which materials should it be made from?

What new challenges arise from the changing landscape of home and living?

Based on the questions, you can choose a focus for your development and come up with innovations for that. Or you can follow your own definition of future flooring!

Target Group

You define the target group for your concept and explain which target-group specific requirements (children, families, older people, digital natives) your idea will cater to. Bear in mind that your idea should be dedicated to either end consumers – i.e. for private homes – or specifically appeal to the commercial sector, i.e. hotels, offices, shops, etc.

Tonality

Your idea must reflect the tonality and values of the PARADOR brand. It should impress whilst also being genuine, ambitious and innovative.

Mandatory requirements

This contest is not only about the design of a new pattern, but also about experimenting with innovative materials and functions.

Parador’s sustainability strategy does not allow for any use of tropical timbers.

The questions given in the upload form will help you to describe your idea, and the experts from Parador to understand your idea.

Captchas for voting might sound interesting at first hand, but fairly difficult to integrate in a nice way. (without completely annoying the users) The registration is checked, because you need to activate your account before you can use it. Besides that there's a karma treshold. If you don't have 150 karma points your votes won't count.

What about a minimum upload of 5 projects before a vote realy counts? By this way you can take a look on the users, you can register possible fake projects and be abled to sort the foul playing users. ;-)

Benefits:
- 5 Projects where you can control the integrity of the content and the user.
- Community as watchdog because I think you can see a clear fake project.
(In profiles I only can see the carma of 0 project users, nothing else...)

" Hello creatives,
we had half-time feedback talk with the client on the PARADOR project.
The feedback we got was that we are not even half-way there. As the first sentence states Parador is looking for fascinating and creative ideas for innovative and saleable flooring.

That means: PARADOR wants you to come up with ideas that are;
a) Thought through

b) Clearly exemplified

c) Clearly explained (use the provided questions in the upload-form to describe your idea
short and clear!)

d) visually intriguing

e) technically feasible

Many of you seem to have taken the word design suggestion too literal: A mere design suggestion of course is no flooring concept and also far far away from being producible or even saleable and therefore - to say it clear - useless to the client. Quote: We have hundreds of vague ideas in all directions ourselves, but what we would like to see from the jovoto community are concepts and designs that are visually intriguing and technically feasible.

So lets try from now on to all get out of the brainstorm-mode and into the working-mode. If your idea is flowers dont show a picture of flowers (we all know what flowers look like ;-) - show a FLOOR-CONCEPT based on flowers; how will it look like as floor, what colors will it have, what materials will it be made of, and what structure shall support the flower-visual.

Not everyone can be a flooring-expert. That is why the decision was made to change the prize money structure and give more power to the flooring experts of PARADOR. First of all the total 15.000 prize money, of course, will stay the same.

The change that is made is that there will be more power in the hands of the client. The direct community prize money will be now be 5000,- distributed as shown in the briefing above.

The rest of the prize money will be distributed by PARADOR in 5 times 2000,-. (they will announce those winners on the 4th of July)"

We really think this will help both you and the client in making this contest successful!

I agree!!! To get more useful results according to the brief it would be helpful to reduce the community price money and and to strengthen the influence of the customer. Not only in this contest. This is a general problem on jovoto! Too often not briefing conform ideas win the prices. This is very frustrating!!!!!

Hei guyz! may be i am wrong, but i see that community influencse on prizes not a problam but main benefits of jovoto - desicions about prizes make thouthands of people and not only few people from jury. You never have a guarantee that jury member isnot stupid or something :D

Thanks mika for sharing this link - I just had a look and recognized that there are some very (very very!) similar entries here indeed! Guys, that´s really not what it should be about - I´m honestly disappointed cause I saw some submissions I thought they were so great and now I see they´re not half as creative and new I thought...

I know from own experiences, that such can happen - somtimes the task just result automatically in similar ideas. But nevertheless we should consider it in our votings and in our helping comments if an idea already exists! I think there is no need to have a hundred versions of the very same idea - we designers should always go for some developments or at least new and better variations of already existing concepts. Here, idea-clones are useless for the client - so let´s keep this in mind...

to our dear neighbours and new menbers from romania!
very nice to see your beautiful works and creative input here...
just one suggestion - it is much more fun and fair when you don't vote your ideas amongst each other and downrate other people to stay on top!

Let's not pin this down on one specific group. I think that's a bit unfair. It's a universal problem that we are dealing with. Luckily it's getting easier to recognize this pattern with the hidden rank feature.

at the address of suyani profile. i appreciate the dispair of trying to obtain a good place in this contest with jsuch a texture solution (corn i think) and all the false appreciative behavior towards other contestants. it's the first time i participate and i feel sick of this experience created by such people with ideas like this.

first - i am not interested to be abused as a subject of your projections ;)
second - just in case you didn't had the time to reflect on my last comment, i post it again for you:

"first you love the idea
than you dislike the idea
now another useless comment...
phew...
did you understand what jovoto is about?

of course you already praised yourself as some kind of highly skilled god, you act like a genius and oviously, as we all know, genius have some kind of difficult psychologic patterns...

so please, i am just not interested in your comments anymore, please forgive me - i am just to ordinary for people like you ;))"

so these are my last words to you:
i tried really hard to take you serious but now, please respect this - you and your false accounts are really bothering me...

and again i let you know that i wish you all the best for your great ideas and hope that you just come down and enjoy the flow of this amazing creative community - even most of the ideas are not as brilliant as yours...

the strange animal loves you. and there we go...the real band has been revealed! i salute you student girls!! instead of blaming your own failure you better learn how to think an idea from the start! i love your color squares ;)

Actually I didn't blame anything else than that it isn't nice to vote half of top 20 with a 1*, then writing sidemails to those you downrated with accusing them of cheating, then loving those ideas because you're blamed for it. And then again downrating. What do you think will happen while monitoring Vasile? First of all you should learn to read the guidelines. Would be a great advantage. Your behaviour will really show PARADOR how "professional" you are, yea, really.

i see you want to put me in bad light just overreacting without any proves. i think everybody changes the opinion depending on the updates. For your information i haven't given any 1*, but behaviors like yours seem a little perverted. If all comments start with "very nice idea" then that person has no clue about design and especially this contest.

Thanks Courtnay.. really nice of you to respond.. I found out the problem was in my computer. Some scanner software was trying to connect to web whenever I uploaded images and my firewall was blocking it.. Disconnected it and now no problem.. Thanks once again and good luck with the contest :)
Regards,
Szach

If it is any consolation, everyone knows that the member-based rating system on Jovoto is flawed and thus next to meaningless. Cheatas' gonna cheat!
It seems best to just write it off and wait to see if the customer likes your stuff.... they are, obviously, the best informed.

I guess Gizmo is right about this but I must admit that the last week of contest and also between was really sucking motivation. At least some of the foul players are obviously too stupid to hide what they're doing.

Sorry to bring this here..if you, Courtnay, are referring to me, I don't know what to say. I MAY (may being the key word) have been harsh in my comments, I obviously offended you, I explained my reasoning,I apologized, you accepted (so I thought) you are still on it? sigh

@ courtnay, what also maybe could influence the rating even more is how you react on constructive criticism... nobody is against you! yes, sometimes comments bother us in a way, because we put a lot of love and energy in our works... yes, and sometimes we do need to explain things better, just because somebody else either doesn't get it or has another opinion! but this is also beautiful! to reflekt again your own way of thinking - it is all about learning and it is NEVER personal!

Let's calm down shall we. i don't think that Kijedi "attacked" you in an unfair way. She gave her opinion, explained to you why she didn't like the idea. No reason to state that that's ridiculous. As long as it's constructive I don't see a problem.

A very creative idea. Wish I had the time to dedicate to such an effort.
But then, would rather spend my productive time coming up with new ideas and putting them into production. The pay is much better. :-)

It is to be expected, for every online community/voting system, that there will be attempts to gaming it. The trick is to keep at neglible levels if possible.
I don't want to praise jovoto too early, but they are doing a good job for now...
Great day and good luck to you! :]

I think it would be better to remove the top twenty and top fifty to make it harder to target the top and sink them with false votes!!!
we could at least make things a bit more difficult to fake voters ...

last night i was thinking about that issue too... i just asked myself if it would be possible to change the value of a vote depending on the karma the person has. i mean how is it possible that a person who got 169 karma points and maybe is somebody who doesn't even has a glue about the project or jovoto has the same value than of serious jovotans, working very hard and for a long time here in this community... phew... don't know if i explained myself...

I think that some trade-offs had to be made here, so the platform would be succsesfull. I would think that the voting should be allowed only after the project is closed for submissions, but that would have a negative impact on community interactions and "liveliness" of the platform I guess.
It's the same thing with Top of the pops you mentioned. People love them. :)

Yes it would be nice to remove Top20 and 50. On the other hand, Mikas idea is also really nice. I think it would help if only users, that got at least one serious project here could vote.. Would also help against contestants friends. Also saw a lot of those.

@metaprotodrop: I think the key skill of jovoto is the production of creative ideas and voting is more a secondary aspect. By this way jovoto and the community got some benefits when new members have to upload for example 5 projects before it is possible to vote.

1.) No fake voter is abled the create an account and vote up to 150 Karma because it took a lot of time to create 5 ideas.
2.) Fake Voters can be identified by unserious projects.
3.) (Sorry for all new members) New members have to earn their right to vote and show their seriousness.
4.) The community is abled to support as watchdog in a better way.
5.) Jovoto get's more new ideas for their clients.
;-)

I agree in some points - but not to the point "jovoto get´s more ideas for the client" I believe "jovoto" must be careful not to become a junk shop - it is the class of ideas, not the mass - this was probably the reason of PARADOR amend immediately the distribution of the prize money - PARADOR immediately recognized the direction in which this competition runs and how the votes go - I think PARADOR was not very happy with the way this competition and with the - sometimes very underground ideas - and therefore the detailed feedback and the change of the prize money. But this is the right way - jovoto must get away from this childish voting - The client and / or a jury has to judge ideas and not just people who can operate a mouse, and otherwise have no knowledge of the job.

This must be the future of jovoto. Members only with own internet-sides -
working and existing e-mails - An uploaded and maintained portfolio and
the client / jury decides on his own projekt . Every member can comment
but not vote. Even a small amount of money to join a project would remove
all this fake and low level submissions.

I think that only people that participate in the contest or had participate before should vote. I also think that many of jovotants are faking becouse I cant explain how an idea wich is in top 5 for more then 3 weeks fall to 15 and then to 22 in less then a day. And finaly I think that it is not normal to change prizes in the middle of the contest and supervisors of the contest to have favorites idea displyed until the end of voting sesion.

No, because there's also a serious group of creatives whoa are not creators.

Yes, in this contest specific users signed up a serious amount of fake accounts... Most of them are already disabled, but hey no worries, all of them will be disabled with the next days before the re-rank. New users with no comments (or just copy and pasted "great idea"), only votes and karma just above 150 will go on false.

This is indeed not the usual way. But the prize money didn't change, only the distribution of it.

Hey Jeroen,
"specific users signed up a serious amount of fake accounts." It would be interesting to know who are there, dont you think?
This way contest by contest we can build a new kind of karma points "the karma for fairness" which make more sense then the actual Karma!
Think about it.

@induit
1. don't get it. Who falls together? What do you mean?
2. Change what from competition to competition?
3. No voting system is perfect, as you can read on our blog we are continually improving the system.

@wwwbangkok
It would make some discussions indeed a lot easier. But the result would be a witch hunt, and I think that's bad for everyone involved. Lets just wait for the results, and you can do the math yourself. As described above, most of the fake voters in the project were easily recognizable.

Hi. Jvanboxtel
I point to that that the rating of all works falls and rises, but there are participants who don't change the leading positions NEVER! These people win constantly. If you don't notice it, it is very strange, isn't it?

To all cry babies that only wanted to win something, they should first think about their ideas and how brilliant they were in fact, and perhaps they weren't even for top 50.
Related to those who believe they have been sabotaged, I understand that beacause like many i'm one of them. My solution always fallen.
We all know that the voting system is very bad. and constrain the false and sweet appreciation.
should not see anything, no comment no stars, nothing .. only vote once .. after all and made updates!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I want to congratulate all participants who have worked and have not put a picture!!!!

What is this? http://parador.jovoto.com/ideas/22272 PARAQDOR 8 BIT
how is possible in a contest that only wants to attract innovative imagination based on professionalism this tiny colored squares (TV studio) to be so appreciated?? through what efforts? and they also complain about that! INCREDIBIL......

Don't forget about the rest which votes also bad to manipulate the ranking and are no fake voters. This type is a little bit more tricky and I hope Jeroen get's them all. I'll keep my fingers crossed. ;-)))

it is weird to see that after she has been so "nice" with everybody all along, after a comment related to her idea to call me an animal. i wonder what can we understand out of thisI
maybe wrong with the critics, It is frustrating to see how everybody shows super positive feedback and the votes dont reflect that. I any case, I want to congratulate again and for the last time the ones that trully worked for this contest, no matter the rivalries. I'm tired...success to everyone!!

I just want to say a big big thanks to the jovoto-team! we shouldn't forget that THEY are the ones who make it possible that all of us have the great chance to share our ideas with others and show them to clients we would never ever get in contact with without jovoto!

jovoto is constantly improving the voting system - they care!

and it is embarrassing that they are most of the time busy searching and detecting false voters!

and the ones who shout out the most that everything is oh so unfair are the ones who should look at themselves!

and the ones who think they are too good for jovoto and only their ideas are so genuis: please feel free to leave this space! - you suck!

We still haven't decided which ideas we will realize. We need some more time to evaluate and test the most promising submissions.
In general, the project was a huge success for us. Within the 184 submissions there are at least 40 ideas we see potential in. At the moment we are internally evaluating our favorite 10-15 ideas. In the beginning of December we will finally decide which ideas we will realize. In general our decision is in line with the community ranking.

Thanks to the jovoto community for your comments, your votes and especially your ideas."